Dear Fellow Shareholders
Aspermont has made great progress through the implementation of Project Horizon in centralising all our content, data and subscriptions onto our next generation platforms. Over 65% of the new technology is now operational confirming our position, at the forefront of the global digital media marketplace for the mining and energy sectors Project Horizon has been a four year transformation program implementing a series of technology roll outs to create an ecosystem of content services across all our brands, through:
We successfully completed the roll-out of our next generation subscription systems in August and this is now embedded in all regions of our business. On completion of the UK roll-out last year, our core products, Mining Journal and Mining Magazine experienced powerful year on year revenue growth of over 35% despite weak market conditions.
In Australia, Aspermont's brands have always been leaders in paywall strategy — we were the first publisher in the world to launch a paywall mining media publication in 2001 with MiningNews.net. But with new technological advances, our early custom built subscriptions platform was no longer maximising subscriptions growth. So we designed and implemented a highly flexible new platform with a major commitment of our resources and capital. We now expect our Australian roll-out to generate similar revenue growth to what was achieved in the UK.
Success in both Australia and UK enables us to focus on the design and incorporation of new features in our paywall strategy to maintain our leading position in the digital media marketplace. Subscription revenue growth is central to Aspermont's long-term business strategy as it broadens our global audience base and enables us to increase the returns from our premium services. Subscription dollars are the turn-key dollars for our business which flow through to other areas such as delegate sales, advertising and additional reader services.